I have been informed recently that the Oxford University Press has just published HPL fiction using the original magazine texts.

It’s a question of debate, in my view, as to which are the texts best used, i.e. EITHER the ones that the author approved or allowed by default into magazines etc. when he was alive and that effectively created his ‘fame’ in the first place OR his original manuscripts as revised texts that have been brought forward after he died? I suspect, with HPL, that some of the former are preferable to the latter but also vice versa, as someone was demonstrating recently on the TLO thread.

Well, if HPL complained again and again in his lifetime about the original magazine texts, and if we have hard evidence for that contention, then it would lend support to the argument that only the revised texts should apply. But as an exponent of the age-seasoned literary theory of the Intentional Fallacy, I also feel that this is a complicated matter and that each original magazine text and each revised text should be treated on their individual merits and, in hindsight, if HPL could look down from where he is now, he may even agree with that!!

Caveat: I was brought up on the Panther texts of HPL fiction in the 1960s, with which I fell in love.

THE LAST BALCONY: On the Essex Edge · DF LEWIS: Clacton-on-Sea editor, publisher, writer and reviewer of fiction. First novel published at the age of 63 (2011). Creator of ‘Nemonymous’ (from 2001). Author of many fiction works from ‘Weirdmonger’ (1988) to ‘The Last Balcony’ (2012). Inventor of gestalt real-time reviewing (from 2008). Publisher of other authors.